Leaders of Modern Finance – Hiring for Growth, hosted by Ben Murray ft. Thomas Dhondt

On this episode of the Leaders of Modern Finance podcast, host Ben Murray, Founder of The SaaS CFO, is joined by Thomas Dhondt, CFO at Telesign.

Focusing on People

Thomas has an extensive FP&A background, and much of his early work as a finance leader centered around data and analytics. It was this knowledge and experience that caused him to be put in charge of overseeing the acquisition of Telesign in conjunction with the then-current shareholders. The acquisition was done intending to scale the company and go public, and so Thomas was put in charge of managing the financial logistics needed to move toward a successful IPO.

Despite his analytics expertise, Thomas’ philosophy of growth for Telesign did not revolve primarily around financial data and hard numbers. Instead, the foundation of Thomas’ approach was in building trust, both with customers and with employees. His management philosophy centered on going the extra mile to prove himself and his team to be trustworthy entities. That mindset was what he chose to focus on when preparing to take his organization public.

Building trust in his company and his finance team required a two-pronged approach: establishing authority and promoting a healthy culture. Proving his organization’s competence and knowledge would establish trusting relationships with customers and industry peers by cementing their status as skillful professionals. Creating a culture of exceptional service would cultivate loyal and lasting relationships. Such relationships could raise the ceiling of tolerance and forgiveness among partners, allowing room for Thomas to make mistakes in the growth process without losing customers. 

This twofold plan, however, rested on a single foundation: a team of excellent people. Digital solutions and efficient organizational systems could only carry Thomas so far. To successfully actualize his philosophical approach, he needed the right people behind those tools and systems. Thus, Thomas’ priority after the acquisition was to rebuild the finance function through an effective hiring strategy. This strategy would seek to implement both industry authority and healthy culture through the cultivation of an effective team.

Hiring for Skill

Thomas’ initial focus in his new hiring strategy was on the skills competency he could instill in his team. The quickest way to establish a competent and talented staff was to hire based purely on experience. To Thomas, this approach was effective in the short term for helping to get finance operations moving, but was not a long-term solution. It was a quick way to ensure the organization could continue functioning through the transition if time was of the essence, but didn’t meet the standards he hoped to reach in his twofold approach of authority and culture.

Instead, Thomas took a slower, more analytical approach to skills-based hiring. He opted to look at the state of both the organization as a whole and himself specifically as a manager. He asked, “What are the strengths and weaknesses of the current financial systems, and how am I specifically able to address those weaknesses or capitalize on those strengths?” The answers would reveal the areas of Telesign that needed shoring up and the areas where they were poised to take a competitive advantage. With that knowledge, Thomas could look to hire a team that would most effectively address each area. 

It allowed him to create a staff of specialists, not general financial practitioners. One employee who was a specialist in US GAAP and one who was an expert at FP&A could be more effective together than a whole team who was mildly competent in both fields. This would allow Thomas to meet the standards for being an industry authority. For almost any problem an industry peer or customer could reveal, Thomas could be confident there was an expert member of his team perfectly poised to manage it.

This didn’t only apply to financial best practices, however. Thomas also wanted to create a team that was strong in general management, human resources and relationship building. The skills he wanted to hire for included non-financial functions that would strengthen the team as a whole, and thus also strengthen their financial operations.

Hiring for Culture

Team cohesion is a product of more than just individual skills. A whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, but it can also be less if it’s organized poorly or if the individual parts create friction, not synergy, between each other. It was from this perspective that Thomas went about balancing his skills-based hiring with a more relational and cultural approach to team building.  

The chief cultural element that Thomas valued in his staff was accountability. He wanted to cultivate an environment where not only were people comfortable being held accountable by their peers, but they were comfortable calling out areas where systems and processes could be improved. A team that was at ease in such an environment would be more likely to reevaluate various initiatives to determine their success or failure, and more comfortable having an open and honest dialogue about why an initiative failed.

Accountability would also naturally produce more individual humility, where team members were willing to admit mistakes, admit that their peers might be more knowledgeable in certain areas and so defer to their judgment. This was helped by the fact that Thomas had intentionally created a team where individuals were specialized, and some team members really were experts on subjects that their peers might not be as familiar with.

Merging this culture of accountability and humility with a team of specialized experts created a powerful financial function. Willingness to improve coupled with subject matter expertise fulfilled Thomas’ mission of cultivating both industry authority and healthy industry relationships.

Expanding into New Markets

Part of Thomas’ work in scaling involved expanding into international markets. While his approach to team building was successful domestically, he needed to probe these new geographic talent pools to determine what a successful team would look like in these untested waters. Cultural norms and financial best practices could vary wildly depending on the geography of the market.

To overcome these hurdles, Thomas utilized a PEO (Professional Employment Organization). This partnership allowed him to, as he puts it, dip his toes into the waters of a new market and talent pool to gauge what a proper approach in this new landscape might look like. Once he had a grasp on the candidate makeup and professional environment of the new market, Thomas could tailor his approach to make the most of his resources while also meeting each demographic’s unique needs.

Thomas’ patient, analytical approach both to these new geographies and to organizational scaling is a product of years of experience in data and financial analytics. However, it was his own wisdom that allowed him to take that experience and apply it to team building and culture, not just financial data. 

In applying his financial background to people management, Thomas is bridging gaps between human and financial resources and creating competent teams and thriving cultures.

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